Players in the Dodgers dugout and fans in the stands celebrate after Chris Taylor doubled to tie the score during the sixth inning of Game 6 of the World Series on Tuesday night at Dodger Stadium. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

LOS ANGELES — At various times over the past week or so, the 2017 World Series deserved many things.

In no particular order: A sedative, a parachute, a deep breath, a laugh track, a clean shave, another deep breath, an airbag, an air-sickness bag, a fly ball that actually died on the warning track and a deep breath.

After all that – plus the lead changes and tied scores and slick balls and beaten chests – you know what it deserved more than anything else? A Game 7.

Well, this is L.A., right, so let’s stick to the script.

“This is where we wanted to get to,” Dodgers left-hander Clayton Kershaw said. “It’s real.”

This Fall Classic has lived up to its nickname in both the Fall and Classic parts and now fittingly spills into November, October, even with its 31 days, not long enough to contain all the October baseball needed to pry apart the Dodgers and Astros.

By winning Game 6 on Tuesday 3-1, the Dodgers forced a final showdown in which the winner takes everything and the loser takes an entire offseason to ponder what in the world just happened.

After six games, appropriately, it’s still too close to call.

“It’s going to be awesome,” closer Kenley Jansen said. “I believe in all these guys in this clubhouse. We’ve never stopped believing we could win a championship. Here we are.”

Of the 57 innings played in this series, 54 have ended with the teams separated by no more than three runs. The difference has been two or fewer 82 percent of the time (47 innings).

The Dodgers are trying to win the franchise’s first World Series in 29 years, a barren gap that weighs on the players and fans like an official game-worn jersey made of concrete.

The Astros never have won anything, and this an organization that was born in 1962 as the Colt .45s, an era so long ago that, back then, it was perfectly acceptable to name a professional sports team after a gun.

It hasn’t been the most fundamentally sound World Series, few fundamentals capable of surviving all 10 innings of a game that ends in the beer-league score of 13-12.

It hasn’t been the most classy of World Series, one of the Astros busted for mocking Yu Darvish for something over which the Dodgers pitcher has little control – being Japanese.

It hasn’t been the most crisply played World Series, this matchup featuring the doomed combination of an increasing number of reliever appearances and a decreasing degree of reliever effectiveness.

But it has been one of the most entertaining, brilliantly bizarre and wildly fantastic World Series ever, each team fully committed to making the other squirm and perspire until the final, final out.

“Why not?” Jansen said when asked about moving on to a Game 7. “I mean, we’re going to fight out there. We believe in ourselves.”

Because of all this, the 2017 World Series has led to an epic amount of use of the word “epic.” It also has prompted more references to a heavyweight fight than any heavyweight fight in recorded history.

Through six games, millions of words have been written and uttered to describe a World Series that – in about the only thing everyone could agree upon – has defied description.

It’s no wonder then that, faced with such extreme working conditions, many weary media members have resorted to the dependable, time-tested bromides. Yes, Houston, we have a cliche.

It’s impossible to definitively determine where this World Series will rank all-time. Yet, a writer at Sports Illustrated attempted to at least put Game 5 into context using a mathematical formula called Win Probability Added, which he described as “a quantification of the incremental changes in game state.”

And who says baseball’s boring? Leave it to math to turn 5 hours, 17 minutes of hardball insanity into a migraine-inducing dull-a-thon as whimsical as doing your taxes.

For what it’s worth, the writer determined that the Astros’ 13-12 victory was the second-greatest World Series game ever, behind St. Louis’ 10-9 Game 6 win over Texas in 2011, when the Cardinals overcame five deficits and were down to their final strike twice.

While it is hard to argue with those credentials, I’d like it noted that only Game 5 on Sunday featured a man running on the field wearing stars-and-stripes shorts and with “Villains Never Die” written across his bare chest.

That, folks, is the sort of thing that doesn’t show up in the boxscore, the kind of development that defies quantification while no doubt impacting the incremental state of the game by making everyone feel a little bit queasy.

What also fails to be captured statistically is the sight of a big-league ballplayer, on the eve of a potentially career-defining Game 7, standing in the clubhouse answering questions in a Chewbacca costume.

The postgame outfit, based on Kike’ Hernandez’s personality, might or might not have had anything to do with the fact it was Halloween.

“Tonight was crazy, so…I’m sure it’s going to be, no I can’t,” third baseman Justin Turner said when asked if he could anticipate the atmosphere for Game 7. “I’m sure it’s going to be wild. I know the city’s pumped up for this. They’ve been behind us all year long.”

All year, reduced to one game. It has been a stomach-twisting ride so far, with a final trip still to go, a seventh wonder of a wonderful World Series.

Jeff Miller has been a sports columnist since 1998, having previously written for the Palm Beach Post, South Florida Sun-Sentinel and Miami Herald. He began at the Register in 1995 as beat writer for the Angels.

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